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The NanoPigmyproject has taken this further by developing multi-functional pigments with two distinct properties, apart from colour, in a single material. This approach gives the pigment, and hence the ultimate product into which it is incorporated, a broader set of applications and the opportunity to deliver a wider set of benefits.

The combinations of additional properties that NanoPigmy has targeted include the following:

These pigments have been developed under laboratory conditions, and are now being scaled-up to pilot production processes. The commercial effectiveness of these manufacturing challenges will not be known until the end of the project, but at this stage there are some promising technical results from small-scale demonstrations of the innovative pigments and the modified materials that they have been incorporated into.

The pigments have been tested on small demonstrator buildings on the outskirts of Madrid by Acciona, one of the project partners. Some of the preliminary results are reported below.

The diagram shows the comparison of temperature readings at different times of day and night inside the two demonstration buildings – one with a traditional reference render and the other with the NanoPigmyrender applied to the outside.

There are two effects that can be seen on this diagram.

Firstly there is a lower temperature peak from the red datapoints which represent the NanoPigmyrender than occurs with the reference render. During office working hours, this temperature difference varies between 0 and 3 degrees Celsius. To a first approximation, it would be fair to say that the application of the modified render is reducing the internal temperature by an average of 1.5 degrees across the working day. This will reduce the absolute level of cooling that an air-conditioningsystem would need to provide.

Self-cleaning was tested in a cementrender, applied to the outside of the demonstrator buildings. The effectiveness of the modified and reference pigments to shed dirt from their surface was measured by the speed at which a patch of red-coloured dye disappeared from the external surface of the render.

The graph below shows the degree to which the Rhodamine B dye disappeared from the reference and NanoPigmy surfaces. Because Rhodamine B is highly soluble in water, it was possible to see significant results in only a few days.

This graph shows that the Rhodamine B disappeared from all of the NanoPigmy surfaces, with a self-cleaning pigment, at a faster rate than from the reference surfaces. The average level of Rhodamine remaining after 6 days was 3.78% for NanoPigmy surfaces and 11.25% for the reference surfaces. To a first approximation, the NanoPigmy surface was only 1/3 as discoloured after the six days of measurement.

If replicated over a longer timescale, this result would mean that an external render containing the NanoPigmy self-cleaning pigment would only need to be cleaned at 1/3 the frequency of a standardrender.